We've just been off for the yearly visit to Tenerife, the main reason of which is to tank up on sun during a period when Finland generally has none.

My other reason, which I tend not to shout about, is that I need the occasional rest from Finns and Finland (my wife is excluded from this requirement!). So for me the holiday only starts when the Finnish charter company's bus from the airport has arrived at the apartment hotel (and thus there's an end to the endless babble in Finnish from the representative about the "trips" you could make) and I've checked in.

I reduce this time by always being the first to check in - even though this time there were (shock/horror) 39 Finns checking in to the same (large) hotel compared to the usual 6 or so. My method, naturally, I'm not going to divulge here, but suffice it to say that Finns on holiday walk around as slowly as they do in Finland and any tactical brain they have has obviously been dulled by the plane journey. As (nearly) always I'd completed check in for us just before the first Finns had arrived at the check-in desk with their luggage.

Usually that's it. We have one of the same blocks of rooms as every year (an e-mail several weeks ahead of arrival works wonders) and from there you go directly to the reception and out of the building rather than having to walk through the hotel complex every time. However this time "our" apartments were not available until later in the stay and so we had a new apartment elsewhere in the complex which seemed to be in mini Finland judging by the conversations we heard in the stairs and in the chairs outside that building not to mention in the cafeteria the outside part of which we had to walk through too.

Not good then for people "needing a rest from Finns".

Anyway after a week or so we finally escaped and were back to our normal apartment in a Finn-free area.

However when the holiday was over and it was time to fly back to Finland, I noticed that a) I was glad to be coming back and b) I was very happy to be on a Finnair flight (even a charter one) with the typically very capable (if not particularly good looking) air stewardesses. An efficient baggage handling system and then a good airport taxi service at the Helsinki end completed the picture.

So ignore for at least a month or so any of my mutters about non-moving Finns blocking slow-moving escalators and slow-moving Finns with large trolleys doing their best to block my speedy way through food stores. I like them really ...

(But why can't they learn to stand on the right and to leave trolleys not exactly in the middle of passages ....)